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One thing any decent journalist knows
how to do is research. So when I was
pregnant for the first time, I researched
like crazy.
I read every book. I grilled my
friends who'd been through it. I wrote
down questions for my obstetrician so I
wouldn't forget them. I researched all the
childbirth classes and carefully debated
the options (Lamaze? Bradley? Home
birth?). I interviewed pediatricians.
And then my water broke, and I was
hit with one surprise after another. Not
for one minute did labor and delivery go
as I expected. I felt totally unprepared.
I felt like an idiot. But after talking to
doulas, doctors, midwives, childbirth
educators, and parents, I found out that
I was hardly an idiot. It turns out that
pretty much everyone faces some sort of
surprise in the delivery room. Here are
the most common ones.
What Due Date?
Even though doctors, doulas, and midwives
continually stress that a due date is just a
best guess, we moms-to-be can't help but
plan our lives around that date. Unfortunately,
our bodies don't check the calendar
on our Palm Pilots.
"My husband and I had a fish-and-chips
lunch before my routine doctor's appointment,"
says Claire Glidden, a California
entertainment executive and mother of a
toddler son, Ford. It was three weeks before
her due date, and the couple had yet to buy
a car seat or stroller, let alone pack a bag
for the hospital. "At my appointment, they
found that I had preeclampsia, which called
for an emergency C-section, with fish and
chips still in my stomach," she says. "From
that point on, nothing was in my control."
Now expecting her second child, she feels
more ready to accept whatever happens.
It Hurts!
"Almost 100 percent of the time, the women I work with are
surprised by the pain," says Susan Moray, CPM, LM, a midwife
in Portland, Oregon, who specializes in home births. Something
about the self-protective instinct of human nature leads
women to think that they'll be the lucky ones for whom pain
is no big deal. "We don't mince words in our childbirth classes
and during prenatal care, but almost everyone thinks it will
be different for them - they think it's mind over matter, and
pain won't happen to them."
One way to prepare, says Chris Pearson, M.D., a longtime
baby-deliverer at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center
in Burbank, California, is to accept it, not fight it. "Many
women are used to controlling everything in their lives,"
he says, "then they go into labor and are surprised to find
that they've got about as much control over the process,
and the pain, as a rafter has in the whitewater." Sure, you
have some tools, just like a rafter has paddles, but in general
you're going along for the ride - wherever the whitewater
takes you.
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For the Record